I want to understand better the split between logographic and phonemic writing systems. As far as i know logographicnlanguages in the modern world are all asian and of a similar character. So id imagine they all have the same roots.

@freemo Roots of the language and of the writing system are not necessarily the same. There were multiple instances of significant import of "characters" from ~Chinese into Japanese and I had the impression that at least some of them didn't import much past the characters themselves.

@robryk @freemo Indeed, the Japanese imported their writing system from the Chinese although the languages are not related. Also the phonetic symbols (Hiragana and Katakana) are said to be simplified Kanji. The Koreans used the Chinese symbols as well but also simplified them.

@digastricus @robryk

Id love to ubderstand how that developed. Importing a writing system but not a language only seems possible at all with logograms which is kinda cool.

@freemo @digastricus

Huh? Isn't that the case with all languages that use Latin alphabet but aren't romance?

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@robryk @freemo As I understand the matter, I would agree. The Phoenician seem to have developed this abstraction of letters representing phonemes instead of things. A lot of writing systems in the world stem from the phoenician alphabet, including greek, hebrew, latin etc.

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